Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1164563-20190701212349

There has been a certain discussion on the Discord server recently, and I decided to bring it to the wiki space since we should formally establish consensus on the issue. Namely, this is about the "element" field in the Template:InfoWeapon.

On one hand, there is solid reason to have this field: several games employ the mechanic of enemy weaknesses or strengths (e.g. Alastor, quite logically, is ineffective against Plasma). On the other hand, the existence of this field has been used to insert information which led to some debate (e.g. Sparda is currently stated to have the element of "demon-forged", but what does that even mean?)

My view of the situation is this. I really start to think that infoboxes should only be used to reflect formal, factual information, over which there can be little debate. (Precluding the possible question: "element" field isn't the only which suffers from this problem, but other offenders should be discussed at another date.) Element field should only be used for weapons which have the gameplay (dis)advantage associated with its damage type; perhaps, there should be a mirror field in the enemy infobox which states what those enemies are weak to, as well. Lore distinctions and speculations like "Dr. Faust's element is blood because it shoots Red Orbs" should be precluded from being added into the infobox. Even more reasonable speculations, like Bare Knuckle having the element of lightning should not be put into infobox because it bears no gameplay impact in any games it appears in, although it could be and should be elaborated on in the body of the article.

What do the other editors think? 